Hello, I’m 100% Noob here with a configuration question. I want to build an HL15 chassis, use Seagate Exos 2X18 SATA drives, a Broadcom P210TP 2X10G Base-T PCIe NIC, and a motherboard with qty. (2) onboard 10G NICs. Using SMB Multi-Channel, would it be possibly to saturate all 4 10G lanes using the faster dual actuator drives? Both on the 45 Home Lab and Storage Review’s Youtube channels there are videos using standard slower hard drives and saturating the two 10G lanes, so I’m wondering if I use the faster drives could I saturate two more lanes? Any comments or suggestions are greatly appreciated. The use case for this server would be a home startup business.
I have no experience with these drives nor SMB multichannel but a quick look around seems like it’s plausible that four (4) 10G NIC’s could end up saturated with these drives.
I’m basing this off of Tom’s Hardware article below saying the 2X18’s SATA drives can reach a sustain maximum speed of 554 Megabytes per second (MBps). In the right setup across 15 drives, that’s 8,310 MBps of aggregated speed. That would convert to 66.48 Gigabits per second (Gbps). That’s well above the aggregated 40 Gbps speed of four NICs.
Hopefully others smarter than me can chime in here with additional perspectives. It’d be nice to know if 554 MBps is a realistic expectation or not. There’s also a ton of unaccounted variables here with drive layout, workload, SMB Multichannel limitations, and more that will impact if your network will be a bottleneck.
Seagate Launches 2nd Gen Dual-Actuator HDDs: 18TB at 554 MBps | Tom’s Hardware (tomshardware.com)
Adding to what @rymandle05 said,;
There are any number of !tricks you can use to saturate a 40GB network link, especially when reading. Writing may be an entirely different challenge. Do you have any requirements of the array around redundancy and backups? You’ll want to be sure the PCIe slots and chipset don’t bottleneck the second NIC.
Remember that to make use of SMB multi channel you also need multiple NICs on the client(s).
Thanks for the responses! I’m running Cat6a copper throughout my office…then it’s AT&T fiber to the internet. My main goal is a solid server to interface with the internet (for the purpose of hosting a business website) and with my computer. I’m adding a 2 NIC card to my computer so two lanes to my machine and theoretically two spare lanes to service whatever my switch decides (internet needs, etc.)? My goal is good latency on a budget, with stable storage. My computer is set up for CAD (Catia V5 and Solidworks), and the server will be my database. As far as the server goes, I intend on running a ZFS configuration though I’m still trying to learn as much about ZFS as possible and decide what level of redundancy best suits my needs.
Well that brings up other questions about system architecture. Typically, you want a separate public facing system servicing the internet firewalled separate from the computer(s) with your mission critical business data for security and other reasons. I think the max speed you can get for ATT business fiber currently is 5 gig, so worrying about 20 gig is overkill unless you are buying multiple connections. And, you will want a business plan so you have a static IP.
I assume you are concerned about speed on the internet side because these are large files that a limited number of clients will be downloading, not because you will have traffic from hundreds of thousands of users. If the latter, then, again, there are other load balancing and high availability issues to address.
Level1Techs has some videos on dual actuator drives. If you go that route, you need to be careful about how you lay out the pool so you don’t increase your risk of loss of all your data on a drive failure. Because, remember, losing a dual actuator drive in a pool is going to be like losing two drives at the same time in a “normal” system.
Hey, thanks for giving me some things to think about I haven’t considered. It sounds like I might need a second server to keep things separated and therefore secure. I knew the speed to the internet would be slow, the main reason I wanted the fastest speeds is for the local system, mainly the link between my CAD machine and the server. The intention is to store the CAD files on the server in a database, we use Dassault SmarTeam at work, but for larger assemblies the download from the server to the CAD machines can be long… our office is running a mix of Cat5e and Cat6 copper in our network. I know for sure we’re not getting great speeds, my company machine is only rated for 1 gig. I’m trying to get bang for the buck since realistically from a financial standpoint I’m stretching dollars.